Rob Malda (born May 10, 1976), also known as CmdrTaco, is an American Internet content author, and former editor-in-chief of the website

Slashdot ''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site ...

Career

Malda is an

alumnus Alumni (: alumnus () or alumna ()) are former students or graduates of a school, college, or university. The feminine plural alumnae is sometimes used for groups of women, and alums (: alum) or alumns (: alumn) as gender-neutral alternatives. Th ...

Hope College Hope College is a private Christian liberal arts college in Holland, Michigan, United States. It was originally opened in 1851 as the Pioneer School by Dutch immigrants four years after the community was first settled. The first freshman coll ...

and Holland Christian High School. In 1997, Malda and Jeff Bates created

while undergraduates of

. After running the site for two years "on a shoestring", they sold the site to Andover.net, which was later acquired by VA Linux Systems. Malda ran the site out of the SourceForge, Inc. office in Dexter, Michigan. Rob Malda also wrote a monthly

column A column or pillar in architecture and structural engineering is a structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below. In other words, a column is a compression member ...

for ''Computer Power User''. In 2002, he was named in the

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "''The''" in its name on April 23, 1998, under then pu ...

TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. On August 25, 2011, Rob Malda announced his resignation from Slashdot. On March 5, 2012, Malda was appointed as Chief Strategist and Editor-at-Large of WaPo Labs, a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company. After The Washington Post Company sold its newspaper operations to Amazon.com CEO

Jeff Bezos Jeffrey Preston Bezos ( ;; and Robinson (2010), p. 7. ; born January 12, 1964) is an American businessman best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and clou ...

, the company rebranded as Graham Holdings Company. WaPo Labs became

Trove Trove is an Australian online library database owned by the National Library of Australia in which it holds partnerships with source providers National and State Libraries Australia, an aggregator and service which includes full text documen ...

, for which Malda was Chief Strategist and Head of Product, before shutting down in December, 2015.

Personal life

Malda proposed to longtime girlfriend Kathleen Fent using the front page of Slashdot on February 14, 2002. They were married on December 8, 2002, in

Las Vegas Las Vegas, colloquially referred to as Vegas, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and the county seat of Clark County. The Las Vegas Valley metropolitan area is the largest within the greater Mojave Desert, and second-l ...

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a landlocked state in the Western United States. It borders Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the seventh-most extensive, th ...

References

External links

Personal homepage

CmdrTaco interview
on the FLOSS

Podcast A podcast is a Radio program, program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. Typically, a podcast is an Episode, episodic series of digital audio Computer file, files that users can download to a personal device or str ...

Rob's resignation post on Slashdot
{{DEFAULTSORT:Malda, Rob 1976 births Living people American Internet celebrities American information technology businesspeople Businesspeople in software Geeknet Hope College alumni People from Holland, Michigan Slashdot People from Dexter, Michigan